Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

So are you the kind of guy who switches off the lights at the breakers just to watch people stumble around in the dark looking for candles? ;-)

I accept your challenge! I will use my thinker and get to the meaning of it yet!

I guess we should all just keep turning left.

I wish I were more of a Borges afficionado, but I'm not, so I'll be stumbling through this one, even with that extremely helpful other thread. What's weird is I've read Labyrinths and Ficciones but I can't say that I feel like I really know how to talk about his work. Maybe the best way to approach it is to divide up the levels of what seems to be happening... "real" vs. "imagined" vs. "metaphysical" -- but I don't know if that will make it any easier... because it's all so... inseparable...? (That and I have some other stuff going on that's distracting me.)

Ben and Michael seem to have a much firmer grasp on this whole labyrinth thing. I'm sure I'll get it if I just think on it a little more...

I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever-growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.

Lara/Kerry -- I'm staying in the city the night of the 26th and 27th at Hotel Alexis (1007 1st Avenue), and plan to come out on the 28th - for the drive up and for the costco trip I promised to make...

I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to get the rental car, if I'm going to head back to the airport or if it would be cheaper to rent from an office in the city... and all that logistical bullshit.

All that is really just to say that I plan to go out to JE's on the morning of the 28th... so if a ride is needed I can help.

Time/resources...if I were actually doing this at work, I'd schedule it out like this, assuming there were two people working on it full time (this may have some steps people don't take any more).

1. one week to suck down content, one more week to agree on database design (which can really only be done once content is in hand)
2. two weeks to write, test and run the code on said content.
3. two weeks to clean up anything that needed it, run more scripts if necessary,
4. maybe another week to do taxonomic work, which at that point should be a breeze because both parties would understand the data really well (concurrently, hosting and site design would have to be done - something super simple, clean and fast)
5. one week to load it all up on a site
6. one week for alpha testing
7. one week for beta (opening it up to community)
8. then, done.

There are a few things that make this somewhat simple, as a project. Once the initial grunt labor is done, we have a brilliant programmer who will write bulletproof code, plus two people who understand schemas and how to build a good database. Also, we're talking about a finite amount of content to which we (probably) won't add - it will be a searchable archive.

Since this is more a volunteer project I would double the time allotments, because both Michael and I have kids, jobs, etc.

To me, the main argument for putting in the effort is the (legit) concern that eventually the content would be lost if MySpace decides to make changes, or delete groups that are inactive, or gets sold to some other property and jettisons stuff. I think that's a truly valid concern - if you look at the direction the service is taking to focus on music, videos and getting married on MySpace. Content-wise, the service has totally jumped the shark.

Thanks for this. I was just getting ready to start the thread.

This is kind of a hard story to start a discussion on... I have been mulling over what to say for almost 24 hours...!

OK. Who is Rupert?

You mean Murdoch?

Please. I can take him.

Thanks, JE for the kind words. ::curtsy:: I like to think I still know a thing or two...

Michael -- could you do this? It would just have to be systematic. Maybe starting chronologically from the earliest days and spending a month or two pulling it down. I could do it too -- we'd have to divvy up the threads and maybe have an FTP site where I could upload the pages, agree on file formats, etc. We'd have to figure out how much chronology matters.

Tagging it up - I may need some help... Actually, if we get the schema right we may not need a ton of work on the raw content after the fact.

(And of course, I'd be happy to help in any way I'm needed.

But I can't write a cron job or S&R. Nor do I have a machine that could do the job in less than a week.)

Hm.

Well, the way I would do it were I on the inside of MySpace is to do what our team of developers at About very technically used to call (are you ready?) sucking it down and chewing it up. (Which makes no anatomical sense whatsoever.)

Given that each page is created on their side, delivered dynamically, and there is no way to only pull the posts themselves out en masse for each topic, it seems like we'd have to save down each page and then run a search and replace to strip out all the myspace code and make it digestible HTML for us.

I'm sure that's cron job + S&R code on the downloaded content, but I've never seen something like that done client side. So that's why I'm thinking we'd have to get the pages then run it through.

I know that their posts are all free form text fields which has a lot to do with why they were never all that searchable. But that is because they were using cold fusion. Nearly any other database has more muscle and the ability to index open text fields. We should be able to fix that.

Then we'd have to tag that baby up by author, topic, date, and if we're ambitious we'd metatag the shit out of it so that we could find things quickly. We could use Dewey for the taxonomy and use search strings for links in on more general things like writers.

That's how I'd do it.

Reminder...

Discussion on The Garden of Forking Paths starts tomorrow.

It's quite the spy thriller.

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/r...

Aw. Poor Gurov and Anna.

Not that I'm disagreeing totally...

But I do think the end is not that cut and dry. I think our response to him is one of frustration. What about Anna? Was anyone pissed at her? Or is she just a victim? Poor, helpless little Anna.

I think the end leaves room for growth/change at the edge of the page. See, right there, bottom left.

I just started 2666 and so far it's pretty fun, though I understand it gets more serious. So far I'm reading about how much everyone loves this mysterious Archimbaldi guy, who is German (?!)...

Also, in my search for the best vintage store in Chicago yesterday (Lenny & Me) I ran across the novel voted best book of 2009 by a Chicago author (by the Chicago Reader) -- which I promptly bought using the extremely dangerous iPhone version of Amazon and added to my to-read list.

It's by Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project -- I found the name odd, since there is already a novel by the same title and a movie, too, but there you have it. The review was interesting and it made me think of West of Here, JE, because it weaves in and out of at least two different eras. Also, the author's story sounds almost as interesting.

Aleksandar Hemon’s backstory is well known by now: he came to Chicago for a visit in the early 1990s, stayed on when his hometown, Sarajevo, fell into chaos, improved his English enough to get a master’s in lit at Northwestern, and started writing books; in 2004 he scored a MacArthur “genius” grant. The best book to come out of Chicago in the last year is his second novel, The Lazarus Project, about one Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer fortuitously married to a Chicago brain surgeon.

Brik—who’s portrayed as having written a column about the immigrant experience for the Reader—stumbles upon an old Tribune story about Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European Jewish teenager and suspected anarchist who (in real life as in the book) was gunned down by Chicago’s police chief in 1908. Brik is determined to uncover the truth behind the incident, and his research takes him—along with his earthy Bosnian photographer friend Rora—back to his homeland. As he tells the tale, Hemon alternates between the era of Averbuch’s death, detailing the anarchist insurgency in Chicago just before the 1886 Haymarket Riots, and contemporary Chicago and eastern Europe. The book is provocative and enlightening, a serious yet often funny work by a very gifted dude.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/best_of_...

Maureen wrote: "thought it might be nice if we kept announcements of happy birthdays and dental appointments, or any other news that we want to share with our friends here to one thread. :)

here's an announcement..."

Mo, I will eat almost anything with goat cheese on it. Except maybe sushi. My kids make fun of me about it, even. Oh! There's a salad with goat cheese! We know what mom will order...

If there was one word I would divest from my vocabulary it would be like.

I can't help it that I was raised during the time of the valley girl! It was, like, a total accident of birth!

Like, totally! Gag me with a chainsaw!

(Fortunately, saying "I was all, like, what?" has not wormed its way in...)

If looking at porn makes him a pervert, well then, aren't we all.

Moving on.

I like Martyn's point about his humor. And is it generally accepted that his works were unfinished? I hadn't heard that one before.

I'm pretty sure that essay is in the book Consider the Lobster And Other Essays.

(I know, I know, I need to scan and upload that article on him from The New Yorker. I should be able to do it this weekend. It really is excellent.)

The 'story' printed in that issue is actually an excerpt out of his next novel. He was writing about boredom. It was far shorter than Infinite Jest; the article talks about what he was aware of and shooting for in this most recent work, based on letters/emails.

What we live for. What gives us purpose and meaning. Direction. Inspiration. Reason to go on. These questions seem so desperately, tragically relevant.

At first the main character's purpose seems to be focused on his child, of whom there is a picture on his desk, but you get the distinct feeling as you read on that this is, simply, not enough... which made me think -- the things we are taught to believe will give us what we seek so rarely do that for us. So even though reading about boredom and repetition in life isn't exactly dance around the room fun, in a way I think that the short excerpt I did read pointed out the doldrums that make up most of life. In that way, I think he achieves his goal of capturing what life is really like.

I'm not sure if I have that right or not, because I haven't read a ton of DFW.

Anyway, I'll get my act together and post this to Doucet's Mobile Me area.

Every year I buy the O. Henry collection of the best short stories from the previous year (well - almost every year. Since 98, anyway). He's pretty well-ensconced in the American canon.

But it takes a certain level of reader to really appreciate him. We all read Gift of the Magi, probably in middle school, but I'm not sure we really appreciate it beyond the plot.

He has his popular place - because his plots are so nice and twisty and fun - but I also think he's a writer's writer.

I so thoroughly enjoy his turn of phrase that I find myself just sort of rolling the descriptions around in my head and forgetting there's a story here that I need to keep up with. It's so enjoyable to envision precisely what he describes. The picture comes up in almost a vignette... look here, you see the faces of the Mexican women... look there, the telegram being held in the air... over here, we have this park bench...

It's at once dead-on accurate, but it's also got almost a sing-songy cadence, almost Seussian...

And it's almost as though to talk about it, to dissect it in discussion, is to violate the work as a whole.

I thought that the paragraph above was hilarious. The very idea that in the moment of a "sufficiently deep and powerful emotion" that we would all become actors in the play of our lives, that we would somehow be transported into something we are not, is absurd.

Esther wrote: "Ben wrote: "most of the time i felt like i couldn't see anything, like i was just swimming in a bunch of thinking. all the emotions were so staid and underplayed."

I was interested in how the character "thought" his feelings instead of feeling them, but I attributed it more to the difference between men and women...at least that's what it seems like between my husband and I. I feel, he thinks."

I thought that Gurov's sort of casual way of thinking (women are pathetic. women are boring. all these Muscovites are repugnant, etc.) and coming to his own self-serving conclusions was a way of showing that he was alienated from true emotion, and that one of the effects of the 'secret' life he was leading was that he couldn't necessarily be anything other than solitary in his thoughts or feelings. When you can't talk about it with anyone, for whatever reason, of course you come to self-serving conclusions... like Frank and April Wheeler...

I haven't found that men and women are all that different in my experience, but I do think we use different vocabularies to describe thoughts and feelings, and we do seem to process things a bit differently.

(Maybe I think that because I read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus too thoroughly.)

I thought the dog was a device to give the woman anonymity, or at least a lack of specificity, in the beginning, and the fact that she isn't attached to the dog at all toward the end of the story almost seems to say something like - the dog represents her former life that she is now seeking to shed...

And the title - I mean, the dog is in the title. With the medium of the short story, the title always means more (in my opinion). She starts out as the lady with the little dog. But supposedly she doesn't end up that way. Or does she?

I'll look into checking it out in the library and scanning it, and yes, I think Poe is woefully under-represented. :-)

Also, referring to the post above, I thought the direct address of the reader was well-done. And the "invasion" of the editor's mind, which is also used here -- and I wondered how much this POV device had been used before O. Henry was writing... maybe Dickens? It's almost like stage direction:


While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight biography of Dawe is offered.

He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances. At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near Westbrook's. The two families often went to theatres and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became "dearest" friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one's trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The Minerva printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe.